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One of the things I do as part of my varied service offering at idéemarque is filmmaking, sound and video editing—as some of you must have realized by now, I have this undying passion for storytelling and the making of motion picture.

So when a symphonic orchestra requests my help to make a promotional video for them, and gives me carte blanche when it comes to creative freedom, you can imagine I’m pretty thrilled!

The Internet being what it is today, being a public figure can be a very dangerous role. For those unaware, Karen Sandler has been under vigorous attacks—hate mail, public slandering, and more—for having been the GNOME Foundation‘s Executive Director from 2011 to 2014. Contrary to what I had hoped, even many months after, the hate has not died down. You still see wretched hives of scum and villainy like this blog post on a regular basis (warning: the comments over there are depressing). Enough is enough, time to set the record straight.

For those who could not attend GUADEC 2015, video recordings have been processed and published here. You might wonder, then, what happened to the GUADEC 2014 videos. The talks in Strasbourg were recorded indeed, but the audio came from the camera’s built-in microphones (so no truly directional mic and no line-in feed). This is problematic for a number of reasons:

We were in the city center of Strasbourg with no air conditioning, which means that the windows were open so we heard all sorts of noises (including cars passing on the stone pavement, construction work, etc.) in addition to background noise.

One of the rooms did not have a speaker microphone/amplified sound system

The camera microphones being far from the speaker means that you hear noises from the audience (such as chairs moving)

Let me tell you of a story that was lost and forgotten amidst Pitivi’s development battlegrounds last fall, a manuscript that I recovered from a Moldy Tome in a stony field. According to my historical data, the original author was a certain “Dorian Leger”, a French messenger that went missing from the vicinity of Paris.

As I hinted in my retrospective in February, 2014 has been crazy busy on a personal level. Let’s now take a look at 2014-2015 from a GNOME perspective.

When I offered my candidacy for the GNOME Foundation‘s Board of Directors in May last year, I knew that there would be plenty of issues to tackle if elected. As I was elected president afterwards, I was aware that I was getting into a demanding role that would not only test my resolve but also make use of my ability to set a clear direction and keep us moving forward through tough times. But even if someone tries to describe what’s involved in all this, it remains difficult to truly grasp the amount of work involved before you’ve experienced it yourself.

Dear werepenguins, we’re thrilled to announce the immediate availability of Pitivi 0.94! This is the fourth release for the new version of our video editor based on GES, the GStreamer Editing Services library. Take a look at my previous blog post to understand in what context 0.94 has been brewing. This is mainly a maintenance release, but it does pack a few interesting improvements & features in addition to the bug fixes.

The first thing you will notice is that the main toolbar, menubar and titlebar have been replaced by a unified GTK HeaderBar, saving a ton of precious vertical space and making better use of the horizontal space. Once you try it, you can’t go back. There is beauty in the equilibrium it has now, compared to the previously clunky and unbalanced layout:

Hello gentle readers! You may have been wondering what has been going on since the 0.93 release and the Pitivi fundraising campaign. There are a few reasons why we’ve been quiet on the blogging side this summer:

Mathieu and Thibault have been working hard to bring us towards “1.0 quality”, improving and stabilizing various parts of GStreamer to make the backend of Pitivi more reliable (more details on this further below). They preferred to write code rather than spending their time doing marketing/fundraising. This is understandable, it is a better use of our scarce specialized resources.

Personally, I have been juggling with many obligations (my daily business, preparing for the conferences season, serving on the board of the GNOME Foundation, and Life in General), which left me with pretty much no time or energy to do development on marketing-related activities on Pitivi, just enough to participate in some discussions and help with administration/co-mentorship a bit. I did not have time to research blogging material about what others were doing, hence the lack of status updates in recent times.

As expected, GUADEC in Strasbourg was a terrific event. Huge props to the local organizing team who managed to make things work regardless of last minute curve balls, such as the venue changing or the video recording team (and their equipment) not being able to attend due to visa restrictions. I went with Alexandre Franke to pick up recording equipment only half an hour before the opening session on the first day, and manned the cameras sporadically, but was glad that other volunteers were able to fill the gaps as I was running all over the place.

A little-known fact about me is that I can draw better than your average cat. It is a hobby of mine that became dormant with my pretty challenging professional and Free Software activities in the past few years.

Thanks to GNOME, we will be able to get some reinforcements for Pitivi this summer.

We’re very pleased to have Lubosz Sarnecki making a comeback! In 2011 he implemented the cairo-based clip transformation (zoom/resize/crop) feature in the viewer. Lubosz is quite experienced with OpenGL, Blender and GStreamer, as you can see on his blog and the variety of projects he contributes to.

Eventually, someone proposes a design or idea that looks interesting, and you realize that to truly realize it, you should also implement an audacious new feature: a way to visually represent an entire timeline as a thumbnail (that one is an open question, by the way; if you have some clever ideas, feel free to share them)

…and to display new feature B properly, you should also consider—ideally—being a good citizen and implementing feature C upstream, in the toolkit you use instead of doing your own thing in your corner.

This kind of serendipity and interdependence happens regularly in FLOSS applications like Pitivi where we prioritize quality over “meeting shareholders’ deadlines and objectives”, which is why we sometimes take more time to flesh out a solution to a problem: we aim for the best user experience possible, all while negotiating and working with the greater software ecosystem we live in, instead of silently piling up hacks in our application… and we depend on the involvement of everyone for things to progress.

Last week, a flash snowstorm brought me around 2ft of snow overnight. I thought, “If I’m going to clear that much snow, might as well have some fun and make a timelapse out of it”, and so I did. While watching it, I realized, “Hmm… that’s an interesting metaphor for the huge amount of preparatory and cleanup work we’ve been doing in the past few years”:

Since my previous technical update in January, I haven’t had time to touch Pitivi’s code. Thankfully though, Alexandru Băluț has been filling the gap with a ton of refactoring work: around 150 commits! That took a fair amount of time to review and merge, believe me. Besides code cleanup, he also finished the port of the viewer to a cluttersink, fixed fonts and theme colors detection for the timeline (so it looks fine even if you’re not using the Adwaita GNOME theme).

Alexandru took the opportunity to not only fix some bugs, but also do some visual refinements on the timeline ruler: it now shows hours and miliseconds only when needed (depending on the zoom level) and subtly grays out units that did not change from one “tick” to another, so your eyes can focus on what actually changed:

This year, Pitivi‘s focus for GSoC projects will be a little bit different than in 2013. As you can see in our preliminary ideas page, there is much less GStreamer (or GES) work involved, as we tried to focus on Pitivi UI work — easier, concrete projects, mostly only in Python. Most of the hardcore backend work we needed to accomplish was done throughout 2013. Of course, there are still some hardcore project ideas around if you feel like you’re up for a challenge. Anyway, the list of ideas is just that: a list of ideas. We’re more than happy for you to come up with your own ideas (thinking outside the box is a positive trait, feel free to impress us).

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Bonjour! I'm Jeff, your friendly cat on the Internet.

This blog focuses on technology (particularly F/LOSS), business, and the "big picture" of the society we live in. I don’t make money from this blog. There is no advertising, affiliates/referrals system, and I'm not pestering you to subscribe to a damned mailing list.

To get a better picture of who I am, or to find my contact information, you should be visiting my main home page. To learn about my business, branding and management consulting services, visit IDmark (idéemarque).